The DNC has shifted left since the '90s, and Hillary is running against her husband's policies.

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It has become something of a mantra on the left that the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that even conservative icon Ronald Reagan couldn’t get nominated by today’s party. Last month, Vice President Biden asserted that the Gipper “could no more get the nomination of the Republican Party than I could get the nomination.”

It’s a cheap and self-serving claim, but it raises an interesting question: Less than 20 years since the conclusion of his presidency, could Bill Clinton receive the presidential nomination in today’s Democratic Party?

Clinton portrayed himself as a “new Democrat” — a politician who, though fairly liberal on many issues, was pragmatic enough to reach across the political aisle to get things done when necessary. Some of his primary accomplishments — welfare reform, telecommunications and financial deregulation, NAFTA, the Defense of Marriage Act and balanced budgets — were evidence that Clinton wasn’t blowing smoke when he declared that “the era of big government is over.”

He also signed a crime bill that helped lead to plummeting crime rates, instituted the military’s "don’t ask don’t tell" policy on gays and, at least rhetorically, signaled that the goal of public policy should be to make abortion not just safe and legal but also rare. Clinton even signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which most liberals deplore today and which preserved citizens’ right not to violate their deeply held beliefs.

Clinton even embraced a conservative approach on illegal immigration, signing a law that raised deportations and strengthened penalties for illegal immigrants. Little of this would be acceptable in this year's Democratic primary.

Perhaps the most telling example of how far left today's Democratic Party has moved in the past decade is the campaign of his wife. Hillary Clinton is running against her husband’s legacy almost as much as she is running against her GOP opponents.

She’s promising to raise taxes; she repudiates her husband’s tough approach to crime prevention and she is all in for gay marriage by judicial fiat.

And on immigration, Hillary has followed Bernie Sanders’ lead in promising not to deport anyone without a criminal record if she’s elected president. Hillary has even declined to state whether she supports her husband’s welfare reform law, which is almost universally seen as an accomplishment.

On free trade, she once supported NAFTA and other free-trade agreements. She even supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal between the U.S. and Asian nations, stating her support dozens of times as secretary of State. Now? She’s against it.

The Democratic front-runner is moving left not because the country has moved left (though it has on some cultural issues) but rather because her party has — dramatically so.

For example, in 1992, Bill Clinton defeated several candidates who ran to his left — liberals such as Tom Harkin, Paul Tsongas and Jerry Brown. In 2016, Hillary Clinton is not only running against her husband's centrist policies, she also has an avowed socialist running to her left!

A recent American Enterprise Institute report found that while the ideological makeup of the GOP has changed some since the end of Clinton’s presidency, the profile of the Democratic Party has undergone a much bigger shift. Examining Gallup polling data, AEI researchers found that the percentage of Democrats who self-identify as liberal has soared from 29% in 2000 to 45% in 2015. Among Republicans, the percentage who identified as conservative increased only 6 percentage points over the time period, from 62% to 68%.

AEI’s Michael Barone found that while the Democratic electorate is moving lef, it is also shrinking. He found large increases in the share of liberals voting in the first three Democratic primary states compared with 2008, even as the number of Democrats voting overall decreased substantially. Hillary’s embrace of liberal policies is likely both a cause and an effect of moderate and conservative Democrats fleeing the Democratic Party.

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Bill Clinton made headlines in recent days for taking a shot at the "awful legacy" of the Obama era.

He has a point. During Clinton's presidency, economic growth averaged roughly 3.8% per quarter in real GDP. Under President Obama, annual economic growth has averaged an anemic 1.8%.

If Hillary Clinton is promising to give us more of the same failed liberal policies of the past "awful" eight years, why would anyone vote for her?

So, could Bill Clinton get the nomination in today’s Democratic Party? Given the Democrats' lurch to the left over the past two decades, and considering Hillary Clinton’s renunciation of the more moderate and bipartisan (not to mention successful) elements of her husband’s legacy, the answer is a resounding no.

Former Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families. Follow @GaryLBauer.

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